Search engines seldom give the right answer when entities or attributes or relationships are involved. For example, consider the search query: “family of Marilyn Monroe”. Using existing search techniques, this query will probably find documents that contain the term “family” and the name “Marilyn Monroe”, but few if any of those are likely to actually be about the family of Marilyn Monroe.
In the above example, the search results do not match the intent of the query submitter because current search technologies do not understand the semantics or the grammar of the query. As another example, consider the query: “When was Ingrid Bergman born?” This query inherently begs for a chronological event while “Where was Ingrid Bergman born?” should result in a geographical location.
Currently, semi-structured information is available throughout the web. For example, “Quotes of Johnny Depp” is available in Imdb.com, while his “family” (son, daughter, and spouse) information is available in movies.yahoo.com. However, this information is unlikely to show up in the search results page of searches for “Quotes of Johnny Depp” and “family of Johnny Depp”. Typically, a user would be required to follow one or more links from the search results page to actually obtain such information.
Current search technologies identify buzz words for which search volume is high and give better results for the same. The search technologies do not inherently understand the nature of the entities against which searches are made. Therefore, rather than contain data that answers search queries, search results typically contain links to documents that might contain the answers to search queries. For example, rather than listing the family members of Johnny Depp, search results for “family of Johnny Depp” will typically contain links to documents that might mention the family of Johnny Depp. To obtain the answers in which they are interested, users have to follow the links provided in the search results, and search for the answers in the documents to which those links lead.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.